We’ll always have Paris

Printemps and Sepp invited a squad of six Paris-based fashion designers to create designs that celebrate their city and its love for football

SEPP is dedicated to football and fashion, something we consider a new culture, which has blossomed, right in front of our eyes. And the fact that a football match was probably the ultimate target of the terrorist attacks last November shows again how powerful this sport is. By trying to kill as many
innocent people who attended the friendly match between France and Germany, the terrorists also underlined the power of the sport. Ultimately what happened in the aftermath was that many more people and tourists stayed away from Paris. It’s still like this today. Ask any hotel owner or shop keeper and they will tell you that since the November attacks business has gone down significantly in Paris.

Belgium-born designerCédric Charlier with his FANtastic top

Let’s not forget, Paris is the undisputed fashion capital of the world and people flock here to eat good food and yes, buy clothes. That’s been true for several hundred years, though the starting point of haute couture is generally regarded as 1858. That’s the year that Charles Frederick Worth, an Englishman opened the first fashion maison. Worth as the first designer to use live models to show the clothes to clients and the first to sew his branded labels inside his collections. He had arrived in Paris twelve years earlier with £5 in his pocket and speaking no French but ended up being the first couturier. So, you see, Paris may be full of very complicated Parisians, but it has always been a town that welcomes talented foreigners and respected them for their ideas and energy. And not just foreigners, anyone who comes to Paris and falls in love with our city — from Yves Saint Laurent, born in Algeria, to Balenciaga, born in Spain, and Coco Chanel, born in a small wine town of Samur.

Lutz Huelle with his muse, runway gal and American actress Kate Moran modeling his typographic top

Which is why Sepp — edited by a German and an Irishman who have adopted Paris as their home; and been in turn adopted by this beautiful metropolis — felt it was an important moment to focus on the fashion aspect of the capital for this new issue. So we decided to bring together an improbable squad of Paris-based designers we find extremely brilliant and asked them for a contribution for this issue. Making football fashion driven merchandise has been a lynch pin of Sepp since our first issue. But for our latest project, Printemps & Sepp Love Football, we wanted to do more than just create stuff. We wanted to show that being a citizen of Paris at this particular moment in time is a calling.

So we called on Lutz Huelle –who is German but has lived here for decades. And rang up Bill Gaytten of John Galliano, like Worth a label that was born in Britain but is ultimately seen as an arch Parisian house. And spoke to Alexandre Mattiussi, a country boy from Normandy who has made Paris his home. In addition, we asked them all to make something cool and appropriate to be worn between June 10th and July 10th when the games are on. A half-dozen Paris creators responded with some great ideas. We think Charles Frederick would have understood.

Paris suffered terribly last year, but our city went on working, putting in the hours. Which is why we visited all our designing friends directly in their atelier. Fighting the good fight that beauty and truth and joie de vive will be hate and envy.

View of the magnificent rooftop of one of the Printemps stores on the Boulevard Haussmann

Printemps

Printemps is one of the great cultural institutions of Paris — a 150-year-old department store that has remained a pathbreaker throughout its storied history. It was the first store to use electrical lighting and the first Grand Magasin that set fixed prices and stopped customers haggling over any item. At its half-century it built a second magnificent location on Boulevard Haussmann, dominated by a beautiful glass domed hall 42 meters in height, and a charming Art Nouveau staircase. Like Paris Saint-Germain, Printemps is Qatari owned. Under the creative leadership of its dynamic Italian Paolo de Cesare, who has been CEO since 2007, this iconic store has grown to the company to a 1.5 billion euro company with stores everywhere from Tokyo to the Louvre.